Pages

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST?

Appeared in Lakbimanews Sunday 30 December, 2012

Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

Hameed
Abdul Karim

Watching Barack Obama on TV, wiping a tear in his left eye as he
spoke in his usual Harvard eloquence at the memorial service for the little
children who died in the dreadful terror in Newtown Connecticut, reminds those
of us who have seen the movie ‘Godfather’ of Marlon Brando giving out a short
but heart rending sob on hearing of his son Sonny’s assassination in the movie
‘Godfather’. Obama’s lump in the throat speech must, of a necessity, move us all
who still claim to be human for indeed this was a tragedy beyond comprehension.

So was
it Obama the politician that was crying or was it the human in him that was
moved to tears? That’s a tough question, maybe even rude and insensitive. But
hard questions have to be asked. Here is a president who for the first time in
history had ordered the extra judicial murders of US citizens without batting
an eyelid.

Here is a president who takes a lot of his time to personally plan,
supervise and execute murders of numerous people by drone attacks in Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Yemen. And here is the
president who won the Nobel Prize for peace. Here is a president who cries when
little children in his country are brutally murdered. He went on to mention
names of all those poor little children who perished in that horrible
slaughter. Does he know the name of single child he has killed in Afghanistan? Conservative
calculations indicate that the US has killed 176 children in Pakistan alone in
its drone attacks.

Children of a lesser god?

Has
Obama seen any of the Afghan parents cry out in anguish as they look for body parts
of their children in the rubbles left behind by drone attacks so that they
could at least give them a decent burial? What makes the death of children in
Connecticut and Afghanistan different? Is it the colour of their skins? Why
didn’t the deaths of 600,000 children in Iraq because of US sponsored UN
sanctions move us the same way we were moved on hearing of the slaughter of
children in Connecticut? Where are our sympathies when we hear the US has
killed children in Afghanistan, Palestine or Pakistan?Are the coloured children
among us less valuable and less treasured by their parents than the ones
slaughtered in Connecticut? Or are their deaths acceptable because the media
has dehumanised them and in the process desensitised us ‘news’ consumers? When tossing these questions in your mind
please remember the words of then US secretary of state Madeline Albright on
the deaths of the Iraqi children. She justified the deaths without any remorse
saying they were necessary in the larger scheme of things to come.

The Connecticut killings were not an isolated incident. In 1995
Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City bombing. In 1999 we saw the
Colorado massacre. In 2007 we had the Virginia Tech attack. And in 2012 we have
already witnessed massacres at a cinema in Colorado, a Sikh temple in
Wisconsin, a business in Minneapolis, a SPA also at Wisconsin and recently at a
mall in Oregon. Now comes the Connecticut
massacre and all the world hopes against hope that there will not be another
one anywhere on earth ever again.

Brutalising society

But then we are looking at only one side of the story. There is
another take. What is it that has brutalised American society to this
extent? The fact of the matter is that
America has been at war every day in one place or another for at least a
hundred years. Its war and oppression in Palestine in collaboration with the
apartheid state of Israel continues to this day. So you can imagine the impact
or effect America’s wars have had on minds of the ordinary Americans as they
watch one gory scene of war after another on their TV sets every day. Mass murder
of ordinary civilians in America’s ‘war on terror’ is glorified and those who
commit these crimes are decorated as heroes. The tragedy about heroes is that their victims
see them as villains. Why, we had the extra judicial killing (aka murder) of an
unarmed Osama bin Laden televised live to the White House and watched by Obama,
Hilary Clinton and Company. Celebrations followed with Adam Lanza probably joining
the partying outside the White House. Adam Lanza and other US killers have
grown up in an environment that has glorified mass killings. And we are not
talking of renditions and other CIA operations that continue to kill hundreds
of people. Bear in mind the CIA’s many attempts to murder Fidel Castro. So it’s
not possible to believe that Adam Lanza was not influenced by the glorification
by the government and its media of a culture of killings that continues unabated
as we speak. Add to this toxic mix the mind deranging movies that Hollywood
produces and you have a recipe for disaster merely for the asking.

Combine the toxic mix with the pathetic plight of 99% of
Americans living from one pay day to another - that is, assuming most of them have
jobs with all that’s happening in the empire’s belly. Many are the millions who
have lost their homes to the frauds perpetrated by the big banks. 1% of
Americans hold the entire nation to ransom. In this fossilised economic system
you find that the HSBC, known by its brand name as the ‘biggest bank in the
world’, was convicted of laundering drug money for Mexican drug barons. And the
upshot of it all was that it was fined US $ 1.93 billion with not even a
whisper of a jail sentence. Many are the lesser mortals who languish in US jails
for retail drug pedaling and minor crimes, but here we have the HSBC found
guilty of laundering drug money and getting
away with just a rap on the knuckles. The
fine is peanuts compared to what the bank has made for itself. You can be sure
its top shots will be given handsome retirement benefits running into millions
of dollars.

As long as these injustices and inequalities continue there is
always a prospect of another Adam Lanza cropping up somewhere in the US.

Talking of banking scandals, RT’s Max Keiser couldn’t have put it better
when he said the HSBC was protected by the plutocrats because they believe it’s
too big to fail and its chairman and directors too big to go to jail. Now that’s
saying a mouthful.